CUNY-Stanford Exchange

What is the Stanford-CUNY Exchange?

Beginning in 2013, Stanford University and the City College of New York embarked on an initiative to foster cooperation between humanities departments on the two campuses. In 2017 the program expanded to include a second CUNY campus, Hunter College. The initiative brings together two of the nation’s most vibrant and diverse colleges with a great research university on the opposite coast.

The initiative provides exciting research opportunities for City/Hunter undergraduates, which will help them to develop their scholarly interests and prepare for future graduate training. And it offers teaching opportunities for Stanford humanities graduate students that will broaden their pedagogical training.

On both sides, the partnership aims to enrich the pool of promising scholar–teachers contributing to the next generation of the professoriate. We do this by promoting the development of future scholars, while simultaneously broadening the skill-set and teaching experience of emerging scholars already training in Stanford humanities departments.

Stanford-CUNY Graduate Teaching Exchange

The Graduate Teaching Exchange (GTE) sends up to six Stanford humanities graduate students each Fall to teach a course in a City College humanities department and a Hunter College humanities department. Participants gain valuable experience working with an enormously diverse cohort of motivated CUNY students under the mentorship of experienced CUNY faculty. Stanford participants will also be able to teach a largely self-designed course* and can take advantage of the vibrant intellectual life of the wider NYC scholarly community.

Teaching at CUNY has proved enormously rewarding and beneficial for previous Stanford teaching fellows. The experience markedly broadens the teaching portfolio for most Stanford Ph.D. candidates, and CUNY students are terrifically fun to teach: one GTE participant called it "the most rewarding teaching experience of my career so far."

Stanford GTE instructors will continue to receive stipend and tuition funding under their normal Stanford fellowship packages, and will receive a supplementary housing stipend from City and Hunter Colleges. In many cases, teaching at City/Hunter will be counted toward a student's teaching obligations under the Stanford fellowship, but applicants should check with their departments for details and confirm any such arrangement in advance with the chair.

* For details about the specific courses available in your discipline, please contact the program director, Gavin Jones (grjones@stanford.edu).

Eligibility

PhD students in good standing in a Stanford humanities department

Advanced to candidacy

Eligible for Stanford five-year graduate fellowship support in Fall 2018

Stanford-CUNY Summer Research Experience

This program brings ten outstanding City and Hunter College undergraduate students to the Stanford campus each summer for an intensive research experience. CUNY students experience the distinctive intensity of intellectual life on a residential campus, along with the research environment provided by Stanford faculty, libraries, and other research facilities.

Each student is paired with a faculty mentor who guides the student's specialized research during the eight week Stanford summer term. In addition, students participate in a weekly seminar on research methods in the humanities, led by a Stanford faculty member, and a weekly workshop on preparing for graduate school applications conducted in collaboration with Stanford’s Summer Research Early Identification Program.

Read more about the 2013 Summer Research Experience for CCNY undergraduates here.

STANFORD GRADUATE STUDENTS SUPPORT THE INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH PROJECTS OF THE CUNY PARTICIPANTS THROUGH RESIDENTIAL MENTORSHIP AND GENERAL WRITING AND RESEARCH ADVICE.